The Wicked Girls (5 page)

7 p.m.

‘We can’t go home like this.’

They face each other in the field, waist-deep in cow parsley. The sun is low, but still bright, and they cut smeared and dingy
figures now they’re out in the open. Bel looks down at her hands, and sees that her nails are cracked and black from digging.
Looks back up at Jade. She’s filthy. Earth and lichen, scraps of leaf and twig, scratches from thorns and bark on her arms
and shins
.

‘My mum’ll kill me,’ says Jade.

‘It’s OK,’ says Bel. ‘Just put it all straight in the washing machine. She’ll just put stuff on top. She won’t even notice.’

Jade is appalled. There is no washing machine in the Walker household. She’s always thought of them as things you found in
launderettes. That Bel would assume they had one underlines the gaping chasm of difference between them. Jade’s mother does
the family wash by hand, soaking everything in a heap in the bath on Monday night, then squeezing and scrubbing it wheezily
through before pegging it all out on the network of lines she’s rigged up across the yard on Tuesday. It’s just another thing
that makes Jade stand out at school: that all her clothes, hand-me-downs from older siblings, are grey and threadbare compared
with her peers’. Everyone knows that the Walkers are dirty and have no self-respect; someone makes sure to tell her so every
day
.

‘I can’t, she …’ Even now she is unwilling, in front of this girl with her cut-glass accent and her Levi’s jeans, to admit
the whole truth. She doesn’t have friends, but she knows instinctively that this new, shining person would vanish from her
life in an instant if she discovered the full extent of where she comes from. She still hasn’t realised that their brief friendship
is already over. ‘She’ll kill me,’ she finishes lamely. ‘Look at me.’

‘Come on,’ says Bel. ‘We’ve got to get clean.’

They pick their way back along the sheep path to the stream. The meadow is splashed bright yellow with islands of dandelion
and ragwort. They are silent, now, and don’t dare look at each other. Their hateful task has robbed them of the chatter of
the early hours. The only words they can find are practical, brief. They scramble along the bank to the pool. It seemed deeper
when they were floundering about, fighting for footholds, but the water is deep enough to reach their thighs, and runs clear,
the mud they kicked up all settled. Neither mentions what they’re doing, but each girl looks about her surreptitiously for
Chloe’s blood, for any signs of what has happened here
.

‘Come on,’ says Bel again. She strips off her top, her jeans, and dumps them into the water. Jade hangs back. ‘Come
on
, Jade,’ she urges
.

‘Then they’ll be wet,’ says Jade doubtfully.

‘We’ll squeeze them out. And it’s still hot. They’ll be dry in no time. And anyway, we can say we fell into the river. No
one knows where we’ve been all day. Come
on
!’

Jade strips off her top and skirt. Her knees are green from kneeling in the woods. She wades reluctantly down into the water
and stands there, shivering despite the heat, hugging the clothes to her chest. Bel snatches them away, throws them into the
water. ‘Scrub,’ she orders. ‘Come on. Just get on with it.’

Bel drops to her knees, water up to her chest, and rubs vigorously at the dirt on her arms and shoulders, the sweat in her
armpits. Dips her head beneath the surface and re-emerges, dripping and swiping the grime from her face. Gestures to Jade
to follow suit
.

I can’t, thinks Jade. That’s where she … Where her face …

‘I can’t swim,’ she says
.

‘Don’t need to. Come on.’

Bel lunges suddenly forward and grabs her by the arm. Stares hard into her eyes. ‘Jade. Don’t go soft on me now. If you don’t
do this, if you go home looking like that …’

She avoids completing the sentence. Doesn’t need to. Knows that Jade is filling the words in for her. They’ll know. They’ll
realise. Already they’re distancing themselves from what they’ve done. Trying to separate the actions they’re taking now from
the reason why they need to take them
.

Jade kneels and plunges beneath the water, like a Baptist.

She opens her eyes below the surface, sees that the water is once again thick with kicked-up mud. It’s dark down here. Quiet.
This is what she saw, she thinks. This is how it was, her last moments
.

Chloe’s face looms at her through the gloom. She kicks back in panic, struggles upward, bursts out into air. She flounders
through the water to the bank. Half crawls, half runs to the top. Stands there shuddering in her underpants.

They reach the gate. Each girl is dripping, clammy in her damp clothes
.

‘We’ll split up,’ says Bel
.

She’s much calmer than me, thinks Jade. She seems to know what to do. If it was just me, I’d have made so many mistakes by
now. They’d all know already. That it was me
.

‘I’ll go back through the village,’ says Bel. ‘To mine. They can’t know we were together. Do you understand?’

Jade gulps, and nods. ‘Yes.’

‘They can’t know we were together
, ever
,’ says Bel. ‘You know that, don’t you? We can’t see each other again. If we see each other, we just pretend we don’t know
each other. OK?’

‘Yes,’ says Jade
.

‘Do you understand?’ asks Bel again. ‘Not ever. Do you understand?’

Jade nods again. ‘Yes. I understand.’

‘Good,’ says Bel
.

She turns away and starts across the meadow, towards the west end of the village. The sun is beginning to set, and she casts
a long shadow
.

Stan’s already rolled a cigarette while the press conference was wrapping up, and lights it as they step into the car park.
‘Good God,’ he says. ‘What sort of morons put on a lunchtime bloody press conference and don’t even lay on any bloody sandwiches?
You’ve got to do sandwiches if you want a good write-up. Everybody knows journalists need sandwiches. I could have been in
the pub.’

Stan is old-school. Very old-school. He comes from the days when journalism was largely conducted in bars, and somehow he
continues to live his life as though those days still existed. By modern Fleet Street standards he is a dinosaur, still doing
his research by telephone and attendance rather than news feeds and a couple of hits on Google. But he sucks you in when you
see him and reminds you what attracted you to the job in the first place.

He plonks himself on a wall that holds in a bunch of evergreens and a collection of discarded fag butts and soft-drinks cans.
Kirsty grins and settles down next to him.

‘Yeah. That was pretty much a waste of time, wasn’t it?’

A rich Guinness growl emerges from his throat. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘at least it got me away from Sleaford.’

‘You’ve been up in Sleaford?’

‘Yes. Even the name sounds like something you find on your shoe, doesn’t it? I had to volunteer to cover this just to get
out of
there. What I want to know is why they can’t start murdering people in places you’d actually want to go to. Seriously. How
about the seaside, for a change? Just bloody selfish, I call it.’

‘Child F and Child M?’

Stan nods. Another week, another outbreak of schoolchild violence: two twelve-year-olds bullying another till he jumped off
a railway platform into the path of an oncoming train. The whole thing recorded on CCTV, so there was no doubt as to the identity
of the guilty parties.

‘Of course,’ says Stan, ‘if they hadn’t got rid of the staff on that station, they wouldn’t have needed the CCTV and someone
might’ve stopped it. Shit. What a world we live in. Price of everything, value of nothing. There seem to be bottomless funds
for wheelie-bin Nazis, but God forbid you’d want to protect someone’s kids from a pair of bullying scumbags.’

Her heart jolts. She’s always thought of Stan as relatively liberal. For a crime reporter.

‘Seriously?’ She says. ‘Bullying scumbags?’

Stan sighs. ‘Yeah, I know. But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Poor little shits didn’t stand much chance of being anything
else. The usual shower of useless parents, absent dads, third-generation doleys. I went and doorstepped Child F’s mum. Exactly
what you’d expect. Still in bed at one o’clock and a bunch of kids doing wheelies on the pavement outside among the dumped
fridges. And do you know what she said?’

Kirsty shakes her head.

Stan adopts a Universal Northern Accent. ‘“Nowt to do wi’ me,”’ he says. ‘“He’s out o’control, that one.”’

‘Yes, but …’ she begins timidly. She never knows how to argue this subject.

‘Yeah, I know,’ Stan sighs again. But it would be so nice if just occasionally people would try not acting up to their stereotypes,
wouldn’t it? And at least F’s mum was honest. Know what the other one said?’

His voice goes high and sappy as he imitates Child M’s
mother. ‘“I love my kids. I don’t care what he’s done, I love him anyway.”’

Kirsty remembers her own mum, glimpsed on a TV screen before someone hurriedly switched it off: flower-patterned polyester
tent-blouse, fresh-bought for court, and trousers straining around the apron of stomach lying on her thighs, her hair scraped
greasily back off a defiant face. Same thing, same phrase exactly; and after that, silence. Not a visit, not a birthday card.
Love and presence, as Kirsty discovered, are not the same thing.

‘If she’d loved her kid,’ he says, ‘she’d have done something to teach him right from wrong.’

The hotel’s plate-glass door opens and several representatives of the New Moral Army exit, the placards that have recently
decorated the conference suite under their arms. Kirsty grins. ‘You sound like you’re about to sign up for that lot.’

Stan laughs. ‘Yeah, I do, don’t I? Anyway. How many words have you got to scrape off the bottom of the barrel about this lot,
then?’

‘About six hundred. News feature. You?’

‘Same. But for Features.’

‘Lucky sod.’ Features tend to allow more leeway in terms of letting their writers express opinions, draw analogies, recall
similarities between the story at hand and ones from the past. Which, in the case of a story like this, can be a blessing.
The launch she’s driven an hour to attend lasted fifteen minutes, and consisted of a speech of Cameronesque moral blandness
followed by a Q&A of New Labour evasiveness. She’s going to be hard pushed to extract a couple of hundred quotable words from
her digital recorder, and her shorthand pad is mostly filled with desperate descriptive squiggles about the set-dressing.
‘Have you got any more idea about what they stand for than you did when you went in?’

Stan shakes his head. ‘The world’s going to pot and Something Must Be Done? Something like that.’

‘Mmm,’ says Kirsty. ‘That’s what I thought too. And what is the Something?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ he says. ‘This Gibson bloke made his money from “What would Jesus do?” merchandising, didn’t he? Keyrings
and flip-flops and that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I should think he’d do whatever Jesus would do, then, wouldn’t he?’

‘Good point.’

‘Though I think Jesus would have started by providing sandwiches. What have you got lined up for the rest of the week?’

Kirsty shrugs uncomfortably. The silly season is not the best time to be a freelance journalist in a world that feeds itself
by recycling the news wires. Especially not one with a redundant husband and half the staff of News International still morbidly
freelance. ‘Nothing much. I’m pushing to go in for shifts, but they’re not biting.’

‘I know what you mean. My patch has got so big I’m buying a van to kip in. I hardly ever get home these days.’

They eye the young followers of Dara Gibson. Dark suits, tidy haircuts. They certainly look businesslike.

‘What we need is a nice juicy serial killer,’ says Stan. ‘Or an industrial disaster. Something that’ll get us over the holiday
slump.’

‘Mmm,’ agrees Kirsty. ‘Only not too glamorous, or they’ll be sending people down from London to steal our jobs.’

Someone from London walks past: Sigourney Mallory, from the
Independent
, talking on her mobile and ignoring them. The two stringers eye her with suspicion. ‘What’s she doing here?’ asks Kirsty.

‘Dunno,’ says Stan. ‘Slumming it. She’s not been outside the Circle Line in years.’

The conference has been unusually well attended for an event of such little importance. People launch political pressure groups
every day of the week. If the NMA had made their pitch once
Parliament had come back and news had restarted, they’d have got a two-inch ‘News in Brief’ if they were lucky.

‘D’you think they’re Scientologists, maybe?’ asks Stan. ‘They certainly
look
like Scientologists.’

Kirsty shakes her head. ‘Too much Jesus talk, not enough conspiracy theory. No. It’s just a rich man’s vanity project, isn’t
it? Nothing to see here. Move along.’

‘Right,’ says Stan. ‘I saw a pub on the ring road that said it did food. You coming?’

Kirsty jumps down from the wall, hoicks her bag on to her shoulder. It’s already two o’clock, and she has a five o’clock deadline.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Got to get home and file.’

‘Christ,’ says Stan. ‘File from the pub like a normal person.’

Her phone goes off in her pocket. She gets it out and looks at the display. Withheld. It’ll be the
Tribune
, or the bank, one or the other. One offering money, one asking for it. It’s not likely to be work, she thinks. They know
I’m on a deadline, and anyway, it’s not commissioning time of day; it’ll just be starting to get frantic. The daily tides
of newspapers wash the editors to the phones to dole out pieces between morning conference and the first rush of copy; after
that they’ll just be calling to shout at you for filing late. It’s the bank, she thinks. It must be. Oh shit, I can’t talk
to them. Not when I’ve got to have my brain together. She lets it ring out, puts it back in her pocket, feels the buzz of
the incoming message a few seconds later.